


Lessons learned

by darkstark



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: F/M, Winterfell
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-10
Updated: 2015-09-10
Packaged: 2018-04-20 03:03:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4771049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darkstark/pseuds/darkstark
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Do you hate them still?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lessons learned

**Author's Note:**

> Not sure where I was getting with this, but I hope you like it anyway. :)

“Do you hate them still?” 

The question had been lingering for days in her mind, but she hadn’t really thought of asking it until it reached her tongue. She studied his face, his deceptively common features and cool grey-green eyes, waiting for a reaction, almost afraid of the answer she might get. He smiled his usual smile, the one that never reached his eyes.

“No” he said simply. His eyes left hers and went back to the yard where the squires where training. Further down the woodworkers were rebuilding the collapsed stables.

It was a grey, crisp autumn morning. The cold was flushing her cheeks and creeping in her lungs, making her feel as every breath she drew was cleaner from the last. A few lazy snowflakes where already dancing in the sky. It was the kind of weather that made her feel at home, and why, she really was home. Perhaps it was this that urged her to ask the question at last. Here, in this cold land where the soil was dark and hard and its people even harder, where the name of Stark had an almost mystical power, Petyr seemed more out of place than ever. Dressed in his dark woolen cape with the fur trim and the ever present mockingbird pin, he looked composed and in control of himself. But she could tell from the slight stiffness of his movements and the tightness of his thin lips, that this was not a land that made him feel at ease. She thought she could read him well enough by now. He was a child of the Riverlands, she knew, and he had spent too much time in the warmth of King’s Landing. But even in the Eyrie he had bore the cold with grace, as a minor inconvenience. Perhaps it was, she thought; the Eyrie was something temporary, and so were its disadvantages. But Winterfell was the end of the line. They wouldn’t go further from here. Its cold was permanent, and so were its ghosts.

She had already regretted asking the question, when he spoke again. His voice was pleasant, but his eyes wouldn’t leave the yard. The clang of the weapons and the gnawing of the saws did not fade on its way up here, on the bridge of the Great Keep.

“You know how I loved your mother. And though I had no love for your father, he was not important enough to hate.”

She shifted uneasily; Her father had been long dead, a figure that was to her distant as it was beloved. And yet to hear someone call him unimportant tugged a few strings in her heart. 

“It was Brandon that I had hated” he added quietly.

“Had?” The past tense did not escape her. One of the many things that she had learned from Petyr; words are wind, but treacherous wind. For those who pay enough attention, they can disclose many secrets.

“Why, yes” he said with a smile. This time it almost reached his eyes, she noted with surprise.

“Your uncle taught me the most important lesson in my life. He taught me my strength” He turned to her again. “I know what you see when you look at me.”

“Do you?” She said with a smirk. This started to look like one of their little games.

“You see a small man that cannot hold a sword, but holds half of Westeros in his palm. You see power. Power of intellect, not of brawn.”

“At least you do justice to my perception” she teased. She was perhaps a little disappointed that this was no game after all, but she was still relieved to hear him talk.

“Perhaps I should thank Brandon after all” he japed. “He took a woman from me, but in turn I got kingdoms.”

She knew better than to ask if this was what he had really wanted – the kingdoms over the woman. She recalled a time when she too wanted a man -no, a boy, a cruel boy- and then another man, and she was denied both. She had the North instead. If she could choose again, she would choose the sweetness of power. Another lesson.

“Brandon thought he taught me my place in life. He gave me a souvenir so that I would never forget, too.” His fingers ghosted over his torso, the mechanical movement that followed every mention of his scar. _From navel to collarbone_ , Sansa thought, and she knew, as surely as the sun rises from the east, that had she asked her question last night or this morning, when both of them were naked in her bed and she could reach out and trace the scar tissue with her own fingers, she would have gotten no answer. Somehow, clad in layers of expensive and stylish fabric, he seemed to find it easier to speak of what was hidden underneath.

“You didn't learn your place, though. Else you would still be brooding in that dreadful tower of yours at the Fingers” she said mischievously. She knew him well enough now to take liberties with him, and she knew how much he enjoyed talking about his origins. He took pride in it, in how far along he'd come.

“There's not a set place for anyone in this world, Sansa. It is the one mistake most people make. Peasants dream small dreams, and lords think they don't need to dream at all. Your place is the one you find for yourself. Don't forget that. What I really learned from your uncle was to fight with my own strength. Use what you already have and hone it as much as you can, but don't try to become something that you're not.” His tone was clipped, as it always was when he taught her some kind of lesson, but there was more ease in his posture now. It was the familiarity of it, she supposed; This was a skin that he knew how to wear, that of her mentor.

They stood silent for a few moments, gazing at the autumnal colours of the wolfswood beyond the walls of Winterfell, him lost in memories and her absorbing the lesson. 

“Brandon didn't teach you all that.” she said eventually. _You would never suffer a Stark teaching you a single thing._

“No, of course he didn't. It takes a smart man to recognise a lesson in life. All Brandon ever did was to kick me in the mud. It doesn't matter; he never even married Catelyn. He died and I lived.” His lips curled to give his expression something like cold satisfaction, and she could not bring herself to blame him for it, despite the blood that ran in her veins.

“I suppose it doesn't hurt either that you are the main adviser to the ruler of his ancestral home” she pointed out shrewdly. _I suppose it doesn't hurt that you took his wife's-to-be daughter for a lover._

“No, it doesn't hurt at all” he said, and this time his smile reached his eyes.


End file.
